David Rieff

David Rieff was born in Boston and attended Princeton University. He was an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux until 1989 and has been on the faculties of Skidmore, The City University of New York, and New York University. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, Harper’s, The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs. Rieff is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School, a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch and a board member of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute. His books include Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles and Refugees in the New America;Los Angeles: Capitol of the Third World; The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami; Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West; Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (with Roy Gutman) and recently A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. He is currently considering writing a book on the United States Army. While continuing to cover humanitarian emergencies around the world, David Rieff lives in Manhattan.

A few people have a bed for the
night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won’t change the world
It won’t improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

-From A Bed for the Night by Bertolt Brecht

Robert Birnbaum: When did you decide to take the title of your book from the Bertolt Brecht poem, A Bed for the Night?

David Rieff: Very late. I came on it when the book was already in manuscript. And sent it to a frienda lawyer in Washington who I trust and who has written
on some of these issueswho said, "Your argument reminds
me of this Brecht poem." I love Brecht and I didn’t know the
poem at all. He sent me the poem and I decided to use it as an epigraph.
And then I was, as always, searching for a titleI’m very bad
at titlesand my editor at Simon and Schuster said, "Why
don’t you call it A Bed for the Night?" I thought, if
she doesn’t mind then I’m delighted. The only title I ever came
up with was Slaughterhouse. (both laugh)

RB: A catchy title.

DR: That did seem obvious.

RB: I don’t think people confused your book
with Kurt Vonnegut’s novel.

DR: Probably it was a mistake. But what the
hell. I did not know the Brecht poem, but I always find writers
from that period bracing because they were so unsentimental. And
the poem does in some way recapitulate the arguments in the book.
It says there’s this wonderful thing, this fellow raising money
to get homeless people a shelter for a night on a snowy evening
and that’s fantastic and at the same time it’s not going to bring
about some fundamental change in anything. The trouble is you have
to read my book to see why the poem recapitulates the whole book.

RB: Well, somebody will read it. I don’t
want to dwell on this too long, but what other titles were considered?
Humanitarianism in Crisis?

DR: There was an article by Alex de Waal,
a British critic of [humanitarian] aid, who is much more radical
than I amhe’s really a guy who has said more often than not,
that aid actually does more harm than good. He would say much more
often than I would that aid workers should withdraw. I’m not really
of that view very often. De Waal wrote a very brilliant piece about
the humanitarian aid work in Rwanda, which he knows very well, called
A Waste of Hope. I suspect if I had had a second title, I
might have had that with a question mark. That might have worked
but it seemed like poaching on his preserves.

RB: This is not an arcane or difficult argument
that you are putting forward here.

DR: I don’t think it’s a complicated argument.
I’m actually quite surprisedI mean no writer is ever happy
with the reception of their book and that’s because we are all ghastly
mewling childrenbut leaving aside this Woe-is-me, Why-am-I-not-understood?,
Holden-Caulfield-on-methadone side to all of this, actually I’m
a bit surprised by the reaction. Which is, “He poses all these problems,
and he has no solutions to them.” First of all, I am surprised that
everything has to have a solution. It would seem to me that any
adult would know better. It’s almost as if when people think about
public policy there’s this tendency to want to check your brains
at the door. Nobody thinks that in the private life everything has
a solution. At the same time, the other version of the responseeven
the very favorable responseis “Oh well, here’s the pessimistic
view.” I think, “Yeah, pessimistic in a sense.” But that’s really
not what it’s about. It’s true that I am somebody who doesn’t share
the kind of American view that it’s all going to work out in the
end. On the contrary, I think it probably isn’t going to work out
in the end. But again that, it seems to me, is a perfectly reasonable
thing to think. It’s a funny moment here, I guess, I am a little
surprised at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York/Kennedy
School of Government version in Bostonthe kind of think tank
viewthat that’s the only permissible view. It almost seems
religious.

We can have a just war without there being a humanitarian emergency. Indeed the opposite is true. In this sense the Left is surely correct. Wars tend to exacerbate humanitarian crises, not improve them. Thats the nature of war.

RB: It is religious.

DR: As if I’m saying, “Your God is failing.”
And people don’t much care for that. But I thought that’s what intellectuals
did. That’s why there are all these quotes in the beginning
[From] all those Frankfurt School and 20s and 30s German
Marxists. Even though I am not a Marxist myselfI always believe
that they are the people who taught me to think, or rather reading
them taught me to think (to the extent that I know how to think)I’ve
had a funny experience with this book. I wanted to talk about humanitarian
action and everyone wants to talk about my critique of human rights.
Yeah, I have a critique of human rights, which I have elaborated
in essays and I hope to write about in a book of some kind. But
this is really about what aid does. What it does well. What it can
do and what it can’t do. What it should expect of itself. What people
who admire it should expect of it. What it shouldn’t do. And that
doesn’t interest people. It’s as if it’s not millenarian it’s of
no use. I’ve gotten a lot of attention for this book. I can’t sayby
and largethat I’ve thought any of it was particularly brilliant.
Although there are some interesting essays coming out in the Journal
of Human Rights at Wellesleythey are not uncritical, I’m
not asking to be flattered. When I am with humanitarian aid workers
we can have a real conversation. What I consider absolutely legitimate
criticism of what I do, “Yeah Doctors Without Borders is great,
but they exist in a system where they can be the outlaws, but if
they were the whole system they wouldn’t have that luxury.” That’s
a serious conversation. [The other] It’s a bit like talking to people
like Noam Chomsky. You talk to him about Bosnia and suddenly you
are talking about the American intervention on behalf of the Greek
right in 1947.

RB: (Laughs)

DR: Every time I have talked to Chomskyand
I have debated himI think, (pitch of voice rises) "Okay,
listen, I might even grant more of your position than you think
I would. I don’t actually disagree with a lot of what you say, even
though I am not of your politics. A lot of what you say about history
is right, but it doesn’t solve my problem about Rwanda or Bosnia
or wherever."

RB: One wouldn’t expect that kind of generosity
from you toward Chomsky, considering your remarks about his “arm-chair
intellectualism” in your book.

DR: Well, first of all, I’m much tougher
on the page.

RB: (Laughs)

DR: You’d never know it, but Michael Ignatieff
and I have quite an amiable email correspondence together.

RB: With Tom Friedman [NY Times columnist]
too?

DR: No, I draw the line at Tom Friedman.
And he at me, I suspect.I don’t know Tom Friedman. I think what he does is abominable. Leaving aside the prose style, which itself should have him disbarred from journalism

RB: You opine about the “intellectual vacancy” of his writing.

DR: It’s American triumphalism put in a hip
NY Times Magazine version, “We are globalization and we are
good, so globalization is good. So get with the program.”

RB: We were talking about Noam Chomsky before
we digressed.

DR: I once debated Chomsky in a private meeting.
Lawrence Weschler, a New Yorker writer, and I ran a seminar
at the Soros Foundation a couple of years ago. We were talking about
human rights and humanitarian action and getting some pretty good
people. At a certain point we said we have to have Chomsky. We can’t
just have the positions that we represent, we need the total “anti”
position. So we invited Chomsky. He very courteously came down.
And then he gave ushalf of us had been in the Balkan Warsa
lecture, not just about our fundamental lack of moral rectitude
and failure to understand the true bestial nature of the American
Empire blah blah blah. That was Chomsky boilerplate. I could live
with that. But he told us things about what should have happened
in Bosnia and in Kosovo that made me think, “This guy has never
gotten his boots muddy and probably heard a shot fired in anger.”
He said, for example, "You people called for an intervention
in Bosnia. If that’s what you were for you should have first called
for a cease fire in which UNHCR would have evacuated all the Muslims."
And I thought, “I’ve watched an attempt to evacuate a village that
took 100 aid workers 3 months and didn’t work right.” It’s really
a level of intellectual abstraction that I have to say, right now,
I can’t stand. Myself, I can barely stand to talk about any place
I haven’t been. I’m increasingly skeptical of, not of theory, I
haven’t become anti-intellectual at 50, I hope. I just think it
is so complicated on the ground that one is very hard pressed. This
Chechnya stuffI’ve not been there, I have been in the Caucasusand
yeah, I have lots of opinions about what’s going on there, but I
don’t think they are worth anything. So I am always surprised when
a guy like Chomsky goes from a general analysis of Americana power
to actually prescribing things where he is totally out of his depth.
There is a wish, in my view at least, not to confront the actual
situation. When you are talking about Rwanda, the fact that American
power would be buttressed by an intervention in Rwanda is true.
And the Left is correct about that. But that’s not good enough.
The issue is, is American power so wicked inherently, almost geneticallythat’s
what I think the Chomsky people thinkbut is it so wicked that
the lives of all these people aren’t worth it?

RB: You frame the issue as a conflict between
liberal imperialism and barbarism.

DR:
I think it often is. The difference between people like Ignatieff
and me is that on a very profound level he is simply the reformer.
He goes too far in the other direction. He is not fundamentally
critical of power. It’s not a question of being critical of even
American power. It’s almost as if Michael never read Michel Foucault.
He doesn’t seem to get the fact that on some level power can do
good but must not be confused with good. He is interested in a seat
at the policy table. On many issues we agree. There are plenty of
interventions I’ve supported. But I think Michael and Samantha Power, who is really a disciple of Michael’s, they want a seat
at the table. They want to be the reforming element of the American
Empire. I want to be a critic. The only thing I support, oddly enough,
is humanitarian relief, but precisely because of what I think its
limits are. Which is why, in fact, I did write a book about that.
I didn’t write a book about humanitarian military intervention or
human rights or American power or liberal imperialism. My idea was
just to write, "Here’s this unbelievably good thing which now
people want to serve 100 other ends. Powerful states want it to
do that. Human rights activists want it to do that. Many humanitarian
relief organizations themselves want to do that. So what is it?"
What is the specific gravity of humanitarian action? I also wroteskeptic
though I amhumanitarian relief workers are the one group of
people in this game I truly admire. They are the one group of people
about whom it is very hard to think other than well. I suppose that’s
why I am slightly frustrated by the response, which in many ways
has been generous in terms of just column inches. As Molnar apparently
said or so a friend tells me, “One doesn’t read reviews, one measures
them.” By that criterion I have very little cause for complaint.

RB: Has the NY Times reviewed A
Bed for the Night?

DR: Next week. I always expect the worst
from the Times. The other thing is, I’m a very privileged
guy. I manage to make a living being this critic of everything.
That’s an immense privilege. To complain about bashing people and
they bash back that’s a bit churlish. Of course, one prefers to
get good reviews rather than bad ones, self evidently. As long as
I can get a hearing I really don’t have a right to complain.

RB: I’m surprised that publishers still publish
books like this.

DR: Oh well, I don’t know that publishers
are publishing books like this. Again, to some extent, it’s function
of my own privilege. I don’t think there are too many writers as
critical of all establishment as I am that get to be published by
Simon & Schuster. I think they get to be published by obscure
academic presses. Increasingly books of the types I write are published
by the university presses and the reality of the university press
publishing is unless you are incredibly lucky with reviews yeah,
I owe it all to the editor there, Alice Mayhew, who’s been an incredibly
staunch supporter of my work.

RB: Can one infer that you will be able to
write almost anything that you want?

DR: Well, no. They have to think it’ll get
an audience. If I write this little essay on human rights they won’t
publish that. That’ll be something that will have to be submitted
to a university press. This culture can stand a couple of sports
of nature. I have one of those slotsat least for now.

RB: Who else is there?

DR: Huh!

RB: It can stand a couple or requires a couple
of sports of nature?

DR: Maybe it requires a couple. Maybe it’s
some sort of ecological thing. Maybe you need a couple of goofballs
like me to spice um, I’m trying to think who plays such a role.
Hmm, there are people

RB: Seymour Hersch?

DR: Yeah, he’s more of a journalist. He’s
wonderful. There are people. There are plenty of people. It’s just
that they tendthere are more people doing this on domestic
things. The Mike Davises…

DR: Yes, folks like that who are wonderful
people but tend to be of a different politic, to the left of say,
Francis Fitzgerald. Those folks tend to be more interested in domestic
politics. When I start to think about people doing foreign stuff,
it’s much more establishment. People whose critiques fall into establishment
parameters precisely like Michael Ignatieff or Samantha Power. Of
course, there are tons of people doing the more literary Christopher Hitchens falls into that level. There is more room for it when you
are talking about America. There are more people with a more heterodox
view. I think of people like the people at The Baffler [in
Chicago] like Thomas Frank, whom I very much admire. A brilliant
guy. I love the stuff he has written about business.

RB: Before Slaughterhouse, your focus
was domestic and cultural

DR: Cultural and immigration. I had this
fetish about Cuban exiles. It cost me two books

RB: (laughs) Dare I ask?

DR: No, no. Fate. Zeus and the Hera decided
to saddle me with it. No. I don’t know. Listen, when I started writingI
started writing very late, I was 33. It was one of those, “Oh shit.
Are you going to be a publisher or some other profession or are
you actually going to dare to write despite being a child of writers
blah blah, blah?” And all those tedious psychological inhibitions.
Tedious, but real. I decided to do that and models for me were the
political travel writer. Joan Didion and Paul Theroux and VS Naipal
and Salman Rushdie at that time (his former guise) and Jonathan
Rabin and all those Brits who are travel writers but who did politics
simultaneously.

RB: Rabin would be infuriated to be called
a travel writer.

DR: What is he?

RB: A writer.

DR:
Well, we’re all writers. Well, he’s a scratchy guy. I was using
it in a very flattering sense. I really admire Rabin’s work. He’s
a wonderful writer. I may be misusing the term. I don’t know if
Didion or Naipal or Theroux would like the term either.

RB: I thought someone once claimed all writing
was travel writing.

DR: To be much more precisewhat interested
me was this kind of writing that was about a place but in which
one’s own voice and sensibility and even extraneous histories and
ideas and things could be brought in. And so there was a tension
between this personal narrative and this account of a place. I’m
calling it travel writing for lack of a better word. I’m not married
to the idea, and if you tell me a really good writer like Rabin
would hate it, I’m happy to retract it.

RB: Pico Iyer, is he a travel writer?

DR: It’s not meant to be a put down. I don’t
mean it in the sense of someone who writes for an airline magazine.
I don’t mean, “The risotto in the San Dominican palace is extremely
delicious.” Listen, if you go to book stores not everything is badly
organized.

RB: (laughs) Not everything.

DR: There is often the literary travel writing
section that includes all these folks. Anyway, that’s what I wanted
to do. So I wrote these three books, 2 about Miami and 1 about Los
Angeles.

RB: And then you went to Bosnia?

DR: Actually I was writing another book very
much of the same stripe except it was in Europe. I was writing a
book about non-white immigrants coming to Western Europe from the
east and Third World and I had moved to Berlin in the summer of
’92 to start doing proper research. I was going out with the Border
Police, doing what I had done in Miami and the Florida Strait and
in California along the border with Mexico. Everyday I would come
back from these refugee camps and turn on my television and there
would be Bosnia burning. So I actually thought I would go down,
do one story, and proposed it to the New Yorker and I went
down. I had done very little bit on war and had no idea what I was
getting into. In effect, I stayed for the war and gave up this project.
Alice Mayhew was very generous and tore up my contract for the book
on immigrants. Which was going to be written in somewhat the same
tone as my previous books. It was meant to be an extension ofI’ve
spent a lot of my life in Europe, I think I know something about
Europe and I can write about Europe as a person of reasonably intimate
sense of the place. And I got hijacked by the Bosnian War (laughs),
in a way.

RB: So 10 years later

DR: 10 years later Bosnia led to Rwanda.
It’s like one of those stupid songs, “The shin bone is connected
to knee bone…” I fell into this world, first with Bosnia and fell
in with these journalists and with these aid workers, of course.
I am interested in war as anyone who covers war of necessity isbut
I don’t have any special expertise nor am I so brave as all that.
Where I felt I understood something was this refugee world. In that
very limited sense it clicked a nerve or fitted in to what I had
done before. It was easy for me to beI found it very comfortable
for reasons I don’t entirely knowto be among aid workers.
I became the person who was not particularly covering the war but
the humanitarian effects of the war. I was more likely to be in
a food convoy than in UN military mission. Now it’s ten years later
(laughs). I don’t know what happened. No, I do know what happened.
It became a way of life. And then there was this great puzzle, which
this book is about. Here are these designated consciences, these
aid workers, and their presence in these terrible places was reassuring

RB: Why do you think the presence of Doctors
without Borders, CARE, Oxfam and others is reassuring to many Americans?

DR: I am talking about reassuring certain
elites. People who live in Back Bay [Boston], Sausalito or Manhattan
or Miami Beach. I’m not one of these people who get on his high
horse about how nobody cares. I think it’s amazing how much people
care. I think this global stuff is crap. Yeah, we are exposed to
all this stuff. But how much can you care about? It’s unreasonable
to ask people to care. First of all you need leisure to care. Most
people don’t have any leisure. Second, when Auden said that all
good art comes from the rentier class. He was exaggerating, of course.
You could think of 20 examples of working-class writers, but he
wasn’t totally wrong. All he meant was that only people with some
private incomes had time to really get it right. So if you’re a
working class writer you practically have to be a genius and be
so good it almost doesn’t matter  because if you are that
good maybe he should have said all middle grade

RB: Having just watched Big Bad Love,
which is a film based on Larry Brown (a working class Southern writer)
stories, many of which have to do with his struggles to be published,
I don’t buy that Auden claim. Maybe it worked for a while?

DR: Maybe it’s no longer true. Listen, I’m
not married to the sentiment, all I mean to say is that there is
a question of how much time you can put in, and I am more interested
in terms of caring than artistic production. What I mean is, if
you are working 12 hour days in a job that’s not rewarding, you
really have to be a saint not to just want to have a good time when
you get home. And after a certain age, most peopleI’m not
one of them because I live this weird, bohemian mongrel existencehave
a family and you are concerned about your family. And that’s a huge
amount of work and to do it properly and more people do do it properly,
despite what you would think if you watched Fox News.

RB: That’s very optimistic.

If Fox News really represents this culture then not only are
we doomed, but we are doomed very quick. John Cleese said he would rather work for the state in Gomulkas Poland than take any employment from Rupert Murdoch…The problem isn’t whether the NY Times covers Palestine correctly. The problem is that most people are getting their news from Fox or from daytime AM radio.

DR: If Fox News really represents this culture
than not only are we doomed but we are doomed very quick. John Cleese
said he would rather work for the state in Gomulka’s Poland than
take any employment from Rupert Murdoch (both laugh). And I am inclined
to agree. At least you could have some psychic independence working
in some communist bureaucracy as many, many generations of dissidents
proved in the east. Fox News, you really feel like washing your
hands after watching. I think that people try, a lot of people anyway.
I am not a cynic in that sense.

RB: Whatever happened to “compassion fatigue”?

DR: Of course, there is compassion fatigue
and even with the elite. This is a country where most people get
their news from TV. People in the Left in places like Cambridge
love to attack the NY Times or the Boston Globe. Christ,
if you got more people to read those newspapers, for all their faults,
you’d have many fewer problems. The problem isn’t whether
the NY Times covers Palestine correctly. The problem is that
most people are getting their news from Fox or from daytime AM radio. Of course, there is compassion fatigue, but I think the importance
of the aid workers is that, again, they are these designated consciences.
That people who do live in Manhattan and such other places do not
feel comfortable turning on their televisions and seeing people
dying in real time. And they do want something to be done. For all
my differences with Michael Ignatieffwell-rehearsed in this
city where we are sitting, Bostonin that very limited sense
things have changed as a result of what’s happened in the last decade.
I do think the aid workers have a symbolic value. People want to
say to themselves, “Well, if I send some money to Oxfam I’m going
to help out here.” I don’t know if there was popular support for
interventions in, say, Bosnia and Kosovo. Even though I was in the
forefront of efforts to try to mobilize such support. I don’t know
if the country as a whole ever cared two cents for these questions.
In elite circles it was big issue.

RB: It’s a bit surprising that you view aid
workers as symbols as a good thing. In A Bed for the Night you
point out that while Rwandan genocidal maniacs were standing trial
to some fanfare in Arusha; 2.6 million people were dying in eastern
Congo.

DR: My book is in very large measure an attempt
to separate relief work from human rights work. So that my criticism
of (Rosie, the nosey Labrador walks in the room)here’s the
queen of Newbury Street. My book is an effort to say that these
things shouldn’t be mixed up. I am extremely skeptical of the role
of human rights and what it can accomplish. I don’t think it’s as
clear that this human rights revolution is doing anything more than
changing laws that will never be enforced and never have any deterrent
power. Aid workers aren’t to be reproached for not having stopped
the war in the Congo. When aid workers fancy themselves as human
rights workers and start conflating their missionwhich really
does need to be impartial, needs based and as little involved with
government as possiblewhen aid workers start saying, "Well
we are really not just aid workers but human rights activists and
peace builders." The way Quakers like Mary Anderson here in
Boston has arguedthen they are getting in over their heads.
And to some extent there is something hubristic about it. But that’s
not the essential issue, which is they will end up compromising
their ability to give relief in the name of an entirely stipulative
better future. Human rights talk reminds me of that Leninist “radiant
future” crap. There is this fundamental error that perhaps is influenced
by the fact that so many of the people who subscribe to it are Americans
who have in their heads the civil rights movement. That’s the model.
Brown vs. the Board of Education. Most white Southerners and probably
a majority of the white people in the country are against integration
or indifferent to it. These new norms are established despite what
people, as Barry Goldwater said, felt in their hearts. Then slowly
reality migrates toward the norm. That’s the experience of the civil
rights movement, for all its failures. When I talk to leaders of
the American human rights movement like Aryeh Neier, they virtually
come out and say it. Whereas I don’t think international law and
national law have nearly as much to do with each other as these
people. And second, I’m not sure of the relevance of that example
on the much tougher situation of trying to impose international
law in the absence of international government. When the Little
Rock School district refused to obey the federal order. The National
Guard came in and the Guard was largely comprised of local white
guys who were probably privately opposed to what they were doing.
And yet the discipline or, if you will, to use a kind of old-fashioned
Marxist language, a kind of consent that the state enjoyed from
its citizenry the way in which people were loyal to the United States
whatever their views meant you could have such a situation. Here
you have these fancy laws passed devised by gaggles of eminent persons
from the African National Congress to the Kennedy School and then
everybody writes triumphantly that the norms have moved. But I say
to myself, “Look, there are three possibilities. Either they are
just charlatans who want to feel better and therefore really need
these norms so they won’t feel so bad about what’s happening in
the world. Or they are really closet imperialists and see the few
interventions that have happenedKosovo, East Timor, Sierra
Leoneas wars of altruism fought in the name of human rights
by, in the minds of such people, not the United States but the so-called
international community. Or the third possibility, they are in such
despair that they think that we have to try this even though they
know in their heart of hearts it’s rubbish." Those are the
only ways I can explain it. Otherwise it makes no sense unless the
National Guard can occupy the Central High School in Little Rock
this stuff even in the states wouldn’t have worked. The court [International
Criminal Court] is crap. It’s a kangaroo court for petty thugs whom
we’ve decided to get rid of. I have no sympathy for the petty thugs.
Mr. Milosevic or the Rwandan leadership can rot in jail for all
time.

RB: Aren’t those courts ad hoc?

DR: Those are. Look, there is never going
to be a judgement on an American, a Russian. Frenchman

RB: (Laughs)

DR: A German, a Chinese. So what are we talking
about?

RB: Henry Kissinger will not be brought to
the bar?

DR: Henry Kissinger will never be brought
to the bar. It will never happen. Already justice is only for the
poor. Imagine if you translated these ideas and people who are for
this concede the pointthe Canadian study called The Responsibility
to Protect argues this explicitly, “Well, we’ll never do this.”
What kind of legal system says it’s just for the weak? "Well,
we’ll have this legal system where murder will be forbidden to the
weak and we are going to admit this in print and say this is great
progress." That’s a pretty poor system. Humanitarianism is
an emblem of defeat. You send relief workers in when everything
has gone to hell. Aid workers are frustrated by this. It’s an incredibly
difficult, frustrating, morally draining activity. And you dream
of somethingany aid worker who is being honest will tell you
he or she dreamsof a solution. Not just of putting band-aids
on cancer. So of course it’s humanly understandable that relief
workers would be tempted by Michael Ignatieff’s Revolution of Moral
Concern, by this historic alliance with the human rights movement
and indeed by the dazzling prospect of American military intervention.
Because in those situations of intervention you can do things. But
do we really want a humanitarianism that’s just an adjunct to state
power? I think it’s a terrible mistake. You don’t have to be against
these things to say that. It’s perfectly possible as a citizen to
have supported the American/NATO decision to move in Kosovo on
really political grounds but totally rejected the rationale that
it was a humanitarian war. When I was in Pakistan at the beginning
of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan one of the first things that
happened in one of the cities was that all UN warehouses were burned
down, the relief warehouses. The people of western Pakistan were
pro-Taliban and pro-Bin Laden of course, and they burned down UNHCR
and World Food Program warehouses. I thought, "Aren’t these
people frightened, these humanitarians? Do they really want to be
seen as sub contractors to the US government?" That’s the way
it’s going. In fact, I actually thinkthis is one of the reasons
people like Ignatieff are so angry at methere is much more
in common between the human rights activists and the Bush administration
than either side is comfortable admitting. Fundamentally, they are
revolutionaries from above, in the old Trotskyist sense and think
they can change the world. [They] Think they know how to change
the world and have no qualms or modesty about doing it. Of course,
they regret the need. I’m being fair, of course. They know all wars
are tragic. I’m not pretending that people are either stupid or
unaware of the risks or the price. But in the end they feel confident
that this is the best of all options. They may be right. Let me
go out on a limb that I don’t usually go out on and say, “Let’s
assume they are right.” I don’t believe necessarily that I’m right.
I’m very torn on this subject. It’s still better to have a humanitarianism
that’s independent of this. That doesn’t get confused with this.
It’s still better to have a world in which General Powell does not
say to a donor’s conference at the time of the Afghan War, “Humanitarian
aid is a tremendous force multiplier for us.” I was at a conference
at the Army War College in Carlyle, Pennsylvania and in one of the
breaks a young Special Forces colonel came up to Nicholas de Torrente,
the head of MSF USA, and he said, “Oh I’m really glad to meet you.
We really have to talk privately, not just at this conference context
because it would be really great if Special Forces and MSF could
arrange modalities for when we hand over to you.” I don’t think
this colonel was out on a limb. It’s clear that in his mind, humanitarian
action was just an adjunct to US power. And he just wanted to make
it work better. That’s what this alliance with this stuff leads
to and that’s what I am appalled by. Humanitarians will say, "It’s
not US power, it’s human rights. It’s international law." I
find all these concepts unbelievably unpersuasive.

RB: And muddy. Tell me does the definition
of genocide in the Genocide Convention apply to the US government
treatment of Native Americans?

DR: Yes.

RB: According to the current definition?

DR: Yes, it would have no retroactive force.

RB: I wonder if there was a point in time
when the definition did not apply to US government treatment of
Native Americans. It occurs to me the definition has been shifted
and refined. It reminds me of the example Samantha Power quotes of a reporter asking a State Department official,
“How many genocidal acts does it take to make a genocide?”

DR:
The Genocide Convention, speaking of muddy, is an extremely weird
document. It was of course a compromise in the UN in the late 40s.
And there is all kinds of language that makes it unclear. For example,
some legal people I’ve talked to say that what happened in Cambodia
under the Khmer Rouge was not a genocide. At that point you say,
“If the Stalin terror famine and the Cambodian holocaust was not
a genocide than what good is this term?” I’m quite skeptical of
Samantha’s view thatI am not skeptical of her anger, which
I share and which I honor her for and that she has expressed in
her book in a very noble wayI am skeptical of her idea which,
again, I think is unbelievably naive and legalistic. That somehow
if the United States government can be brought to its senses and
understand its obligations under international law that somehow
all will be well. It seems to me to be as naive and otherworldly
as Chomsky’s sense that the US is responsible for all the wickedness
in the world. Samantha’s conformist faith in the redemptive power
of the US, if only it can be brought to its sensesbecause
what does Samantha’s book say? It says in a brilliant way, with
incredible investigative power and literary force and moral passion,
“The Americans have not done what they are obliged to do under international
law and what the best traditions of United States would bid them
do. And if we can some how get the United States to live up to its
better nature the world will be a vastly better place.” I would
have welcomed an American intervention in Rwanda. I campaigned for
one in Bosnia, though not on humanitarian grounds. That’s a very
important point for me. Neither in Kosovo or Rwanda could I share
or participate in any kind of activism that involves saying that
there were humanitarian reasons. For me that really did smack of
racism. I didn’t think Sarajevo was the worst place in the world
in 1992 nor do I in retrospect. I certainly think on a humanitarian
basis as opposed to a political basis, the intervention in Kosovo
may have been quite counter productive. That was clear at the time,
not just in retrospect. I think you can have just wars that don’t
have a humanitarian basis. One of the ways the conception of humanitarianism
is being bent completely out of shape, losing, its specific gravity
to use another image is that suddenly we talk about everything in
humanitarian terms. My friend Ronnie Brauman at MSF France says
if Auschwitz happened today they would call it a humanitarian emergency.
We can have a just war without there being a humanitarian emergency.
Indeed the opposite is true. In this sense the Left is surely correct.
Wars tend to exacerbate humanitarian crises not improve them, that’s
the nature of war. So already it’s a fantasy. In Samantha’s case
and people who think like her. I think they have a bad case of American
exceptionalism. Maybe I missed civics class or something. (I did
miss civics class, I went to French schools in New York, in point
of fact, biographically). The United States is a fascinating country
with many brilliant and remarkable qualities and also many ghastly
qualities. And, it’s another nation like other nations. I read Samantha’s
book, which I greatly admire on many levels. But was left with the
strange impression at the end was that what she was really saying
was, “If only the City on the Hill would muster it’s legions and
send them out to do good in the world that would really be redemptive.”

RB: Early in the conversation we talked about
the religious undertones. This is another triumph of hope over experience.
People do want to believe that forces of good in the world will
take up the battle against evils. Also, don’t some of the people
you call American exceptionalists assign this noble mission to the
US by default?

DR: I am amazed by the ahistoricism of it.
All of the justifications used by the people like Samantha and Michael
Ignatieff have been used by all intellectual servants of empire.
These are the justifications for British colonialism, French colonialism
in the 19th century. Hell, they were even the justifications for
Leopold’s colonization of Congo. Of course it was a lie and a publicity
stunt. Okay, then let them say then that they are liberal imperialists
who want this new world order, an American raj that will put the
fuzzy wuzzies in line who are doing such terrible things to their
own people.

RB: Chomsky would call them neo-Mandarins.

DR: Chomsky has fallen into, for all his
value and his interests he is a brilliant reader of the news,
he is a guy of formidable intellect and he is able to make connections
that other people don’t make. He has been, to his credit, on the
subject of both Timor and the Palestinians a man haunted by really
horrible things happening to defenseless people. For that the must
be honored, whatever harshness I feel towards him, particularly
these days I don’t want to lose sightparticularly when I am
trying to reel myself back from the polemical abyssof those
qualities. If Chomsky and Ed Herrman and those people have too often
lapsed into a knee-jerk sense that the Americans are at the root
of all evil, people like Ignatieff and Samantha Power are making
arguments that history of 19th century imperialism should at least
cause them to question. I see nothing in their work of any doubt.
To reiterate, Michael always says “David thinks he is the only one
with a tragic sense of the world.” It’s not that at all. It’s not
at all that he lacks a tragic sense of the world; he has that in
abundance. It’s that the logic of his position, whether intended
or unintended, seems to drive him to throw in his lot with American
power. It’s as if he sees no effective alternative to the American
Empire. I keep feeling Michael is simply not haunted enough by the
horror and the reality of imperialism. It’s as if this time it’s
supposed to be different. Intellectually, of course, he knows this,
but, as I say, I think that the logic of his positions makes him
optimistic about the ‘exceptionalism’ of the American empire in
a way I see no historical reason or basis for being. I don’t mean
credulous, but I do mean overly sanguined. Why, I’m not sure. Probably
because, like the rest of us, he is still groping for a solution.
And perhaps Michael’s right, perhaps, from a meliorist point of
view, there is nothing better on offer than the American Empire.
But I don’t believe this, and wonder how long Michael will continue
to do so himself. Here, I’m reminded of Saul Bellow who said, somewhere
in an interview, "We all tend to idealize the time we live
in because we are alive, but that while this is a natural, perhaps
even an unavoidable human reaction, it needs to be treated skeptically.
Just because we are alive doesn’t mean things are getting better,
or will work out."

Copyright 2002 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing